Ptarmigan and Mother's Day and Promotion... Oh My!

Hello everyone! This week has been super busy because we are almost at the end of the year!!! As my first year of teaching draws to a close I feel all the same excitement for summer as I did growing up. It probably doesn't help that in about a month I'll be off to Disney World (dying of heat stroke no doubt). I've been planning a trip to Disney since I was probably five. It is time. Anyway let's get this blog party started, haha. I give you the cat pictures first, blow right on by them if you wish.

This photo sums up my social life on a weekend night eerily well...

I got Sonic a feathered toy as a peace offering after his vet visit, he loves it immensely and jumps three or four feet in his efforts to bring it down. I also won a fish at a cakewalk. Because the cakewalks here don't necessarily include cakes... or walking really.

Those were my personal pics... time for some Alaska! Everyone in the village seems to be going up in the mountains to a lake for hunting and fishing. I would love to go camping but am not really a hunter or fisher. Anyway our language teacher brought back this massive fish:

Inside was a smaller fish it had eaten:

And inside that fish was a tracking number:

 She also showed us how to butcher a ptarmigan, much to the delight of my kiddos... 

until the smell of the guts got to them!

After removing the stomach she blew it up and hung it to dry.

 Several middle schoolers were helping pluck and butcher the many ptarmigan.

Here it is all laid out. She also cut off the foot, you pull on the tendon and the toes move! 

My kids thought that was awesome.

Alrighty, we aren't butchering things over in my room, but we are doing some fun stuff. I had to create a unit for my school district integrating the local learning framework. Here is a tiny sample of things I made; the one on the left is a listening activity where they identify animals and colors based on a story I read, the one on the right is a page from a book they made that worked on number recognition.

It is finally warm enough for outdoor recess! We hit 32 degrees and took the chance to flock outside. Sledding seems to be the favorite activity.

 And of course our weekly art project! Though really this one was more of a craft... Mother's Day Cards!!! I actually had everything out and ready to go when I realized I forgot to make a sample! I made one quick as a wink, I think that the kids liked the sticky foam, we hadn't used it before.

But of course those were only the beginnings of the week... Friday night contained the big event.

Graduation

Technically the Kinders get promoted I guess, I'd never heard it that way until this week though... also the eighth graders and seniors graduated but I work with the little kids so they are the ones I took lots of pictures of!